Structure the Task! Adapting Special Education strategies for at-home learning: A series.

In this series, we have been looking at how we can adapt strategies that are frequently used in the classroom for students with Special Educational Needs, and how we can adapt them for At-Home learning. We discussed Structuring your day with schedules and Structuring the Environment with limited distractions.

In this post, we will look into how we can break down a task into more manageable parts, and how this structure should be individualized to what your child needs.

Let's look at examples of the types of work your child may be asked to complete, and ways that we can break them down into more manageable tasks. Our goal is two-fold. For our children to increase their independence with assigned tasks, and for this new-found independence to create an increase in positive interactions with their school work.

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Singing in: Even as adults, we need help remembering our sign-in information for all the different sites we access! Simple prompts such as writing the sign-in information to your child’s Google or DreamBox account can help them independently access their most frequently visited sites.

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There is no need for our children to become frustrated before they even begin working on their task. Here I have created a simple step-by-step guide for a child to follow when they need to create a Google Doc. Remember, use Top to Bottom, or Left to Right when ordering your tasks. I added visual prompts here to help a child quickly identify what they are looking for.

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Here I have included the key steps to get a child started on their work. This can be used as a reminder to reference when the common question of “what do I do now?” comes up. I have added checkboxes to the left which allows the child to track which step they are on, and see how many steps until they are done. Remember, the concept of finished is very important! You’ll also notice that there are 2 visual reminders for things that may be difficult to find on the screen. You might also notice the third step I have added some additional prompting by including the title for the child. If we think about the goal of the assignment, it is not who can create the most unique title. I want the child to be ready to do their best work on their paragraph, so I removed the roadblock of them having to create their own title.

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Receiving open-ended questions such as “Write a paragraph about your weekend” can be very overwhelming. Here I provided the child sentence starters to prompt their ideas. This will help them remember they need 4 sentences and take a task that began as very open-ended and created a great deal of structure for them to work through.

These examples are meant to inspire your interactions with your child. Don’t feel like you need to include every step to every task. Start with something small. Writing down your child’s sign-in if they need it, or create a simple checklist on a sticky note for one task. The effort put in before your child begins the work, pays off when they begin to be able to approach a task more independently.